Resources for Environmental and Sustainability Communicators
This report provides local climate advocates across civil society as well as government, media and business with advice on how to effectively engage their audiences with climate change. This work is the result of a series of values-based focus groups (known as narrative workshops, a peer-reviewed research model we’ve developed over the past decade), which we trained our national partners...
Britain Talks Climate is an evidence-based toolkit designed to support any organisation that wants to engage the British public on climate change. It offers a shared, strategic understanding of the British public, and – against a backdrop of growing concern about polarisation – identifies effective ways to engage across the whole of society. The segmentation research underpinning Britain Talks Climate...
In this report we explore additional language that speaks to the values and identities of different audiences within Alberta. The report includes narratives tailored to each audience – what communicators call “sub-narratives”. The sub-narratives are intended to sit within the larger meta- narrative from Report I, giving the latter greater nuance and speci c meaning.
There is a growing appreciation of the need to engage the public around climate change, but how much do researchers and practitioners agree on how to go about this? How do they approach communicating climate change, and what are their motives for doing so? The Climate Communication Project aims to understand and evaluate existing expertise in the UK on communicating...
This guide is intended to provide practical guidance for climate and energy communicators about what language works well and – crucially – what language might pose an obstacle for communicating with any specific group. This first volume is concerned with finding the language that works best across Albertan society by helping to find common ground across very different positions. This...
Effective communications requires reflecting and responding to different audiences, and tailoring messaging to the values of each audience. NGOs and financiers have different values and therefore use different narratives, often with entirely different vocabularies. Policymakers – especially those in government and multilateral development agencies – tend to sit between the two sectors, adopting some of the NGO concerns about social...
As several decades of awareness-raising and initiatives to engage the public have shown, climate change doesn’t communicate itself. A burgeoning evidence base on the social science of climate change communication now provides many explanations for why engaging on climate change can be challenging. Climate science is filled with uncertainties, a notorious stumbling block for communicating with non-scientists. For some, the...
A large body of research shows that people need to understand climate change as a narrative, containing their own language and shaped by their own values and experience. Most climate change language however is dry, technical or too based in the campaign culture of the Global North. To date, there has been very little research into effective climate change communications...
Global Narratives is a pioneering initiative launched jointly by Climate Outreach and Climate Action Network International (CAN-I) to test and develop climate change messaging and narratives. It pilots a new model of cooperative design that avoids the high cost of qualitative research by training national partners to conduct research themselves with their own audiences based on Climate Outreach’s Narrative Workshop...
To accompany this year’s UK Climate Coalition Show the Love campaign, which we helped shape, we’ve created a new practical guide, “Public engagement with climate change post-Brexit: a centre-right perspective”, in collaboration with the Climate Coalition. Many climate campaigners and communicators consistently state that they struggle to have conversations with people of centre-right values – in response, our new guide...
